31–40 of 70 posts
How is a locked down vm, that I don’t control, “near me” more convenient than the fast, portable computer in front of me that I can build apps anywhere on, even when not networked?
Other products to check out: codesphere, stackblitz, Replit
Sure, setting up a development environment for your small pet project is easy. But as soon as you start working on software that has been maintained for a few years, dependencies start to grow. A typical old Java project depends on Gradle (or Maven, or even Ant), an outdated JDK, Eclipse, Protobuf tooling, XML tooling, custom tooling, you name it. Next, your project may require linting, formatting, and will be checked by some third party services. Recently, Docker and friends have joined the party, and a web based frontend requires TypeScript, a framework, Webpack, and many other libraries and tools.
Joining a team with such a project is not an easy task. In a typical 500,000 line code project, it may take a whole day or more to get the basic system up and running. All the dependencies may break in a myriad of ways, and can result in a lot of unnecessary problem hunting.
Sure, there are tools to automate setting up the build environment. But even those require maintenance, and setting things up for quick onboarding requires a lot of time, and if done wrong, will take even more time to get right later.
It would save a lot of money and effort if I could have a reproducible development environment, and I would not mind if that is in the cloud or not.
Other development environments might not benefit so much:
For Go, the SDK is easy to install and VS Code works.
I’m out of date on Python and assumed package management would be kind of a pain to deal with, but I tried miniconda recently and it it’s pretty nice.
Web development environments continue to evolve, but there are some easy to use ones. I like Deno so far.
I don't trust Google anymore. They will shut down this "experiment" no matter how successful it becomes.
It sounds like whatever project you build will be in a GitHub repo, so maybe you could enjoy trying it out while it lasts and switch to some other development environment if needed?
This is Google at its 1990s COMDEX/Microsoft Vapourware worst. There is no product to try, no code samples, no documentation. Just an animated GIF of what the experience may be like and a signup link.
EDIT: to add, the blog post does mention this: it is built on-top of VSCode, so it's a UI people are used to.
(googler, opinions are my own).